Special
by Martianlightsaber
Summary: Set during the end of Silver on the Tree, a short introspective piece on what the end of the battle between Light and Dark means in the eyes of the five children.


_This occurs just during/after the end of SotT and is kind of a fic-ified version of my thoughts on what the ending meant. I find it sort of strange that people see the loss of memories as something sad or painful when it was really meant to be something good, especially for Will._

* * *

'Special', she had called him the day before.

She looked at the pale, puzzled but cheerful face of their Welsh companion as he fingered the blue-green stone and found herself wondering why she recalled being angry with him when she had called him that. She thanked him as she took the pebble from his outstretched hand, admiring the way the colors melted into each other, and saw him smiling wistfully out of the corner of her eye.

It had only been two days since they had met him, but it was easy to tell that the boy had few friends. There was something unsettling about the way he carried himself, a confidence not often found in farm boys; but behind that haughty exterior, he was still a lonely twelve-year-old boy, glad to have found friends from faraway lands.

* * *

"…wind in the trees," Barney trailed off.

From the looks on his siblings' faces neither of them had heard the haunting strain of music, half melancholy, half celebratory, as it blew across the mountainside. He had a feeling it was important, just as he had a feeling that they would meet Will on their first day in Wales. He turned instead to the strange Welsh boy and saw him lost in thought, an intense look in his tawny eyes which brought the unexpected thought of Arthurian legends. Finally he turned to Will, the simple Buckinghamshire boy they had met in Cornwall over a year back, and found him with his usual placid smile and glazed-over blue-grey eyes which hid a wealth of… something.

He shook it off as his own overactive imagination – after all, they were merely on holiday in Wales, staying at a hotel next to a golf course! It was enough of a coincidence to find other children their age to hang around with, but his inner sense told him that there was more here than met the eye.

* * *

'Bent inland as though they were bowing to something,' Simon thought, unnerved.

The thought left as quickly as it had come, and Simon surveyed the motley crew by the mountainside, feeling very much a chaperon of the group since he was, after all, the oldest. He was wary of their two new friends, both equally strange personas – Will with his reticent nature and Bran with his quiet arrogance. Yet, there was something about them that told him to trust them, an unspoken code of honor amongst good men.

As they trooped off toward shelter, Will told him about his brother Stephen in her Majesty's Navy and their run-in with Richie Moore, told him about fishing with his brothers and Christmas with his family. Bran soon flanked him and talked about his life on the farm and the mad neighbor of theirs by the name of Caradog Pritchard. Simon thought that they'd perhaps read the wariness in his eyes, and decided that they did seem pretty normal after all.

* * *

"Jenny-oh?" he quipped, holding the unusual stone out to her.

A great many things ran through his mind at that moment – for one thing, such stones weren't found in this part of Wales as far as he knew, and what one would be doing in his pocket was beyond his comprehension. This of course brought him to the second thing in his train of thought – he'd thought Jane pretty since they'd met the previous day and was secretly glad that she didn't mind his nickname for her. He remembered voicing this to Will once, but couldn't remember when or why, or what his reaction was.

He couldn't place the sense of elation that was singing through him at that moment on the gusty mountainside. He was certain that it wasn't because of Jane; he knew that he was not quite interested in girls_that_ way yet, but thinking of her acted as a trigger, and he felt… right. 'Loving bonds'; the thought flashed into his mind, familiar yet not from his conscious memory. He must have been staring off into space for a long time trying to sort out his thoughts, because Will was soon tugging at his sleeve, pointing bemusedly at the retreating figures of the Drews.

* * *

'Five will return…' Will thought wryly.

He hadn't known till that moment what Merriman had in mind for the five of them, but his monologue about the world being left to men was music to Will's ears. Although he was the 'watchman', his duties were that of an Old One no longer, but merely that of a boy from a righteous English family, who had friends with special talents, thrown together by fate, chance, or whatever one wished to call it. Over the past two years, even in the peak of the battle against the Dark, there had been many times when Will was able to forget that he was from the circle of the Light and could enjoy being a normal kid. Now with the Dark vanquished forever, he found it that much easier to slip back into this role.

He watched Bran and Jane's little exchange with amusement and decided that it was an excellent chance to get his friend back for the teasing he wouldn't even remember in the Lost Land. He also thought about how aptly the Circle had been chosen: Barney for his intuition and artistic talent, Jane for her empathy and motherly concern for those around her, Simon for his steadfastness and practicality, Bran for all that he signified about conflict and Love, and himself an ordinary boy with a greater calling to guide the future of man.

It's quite true, he thought, when people tell you that everyone is special.


End file.
